


Age(s) of the Geek, chapter 3 - Leverage / Doctor Who

by mermaid



Series: Five times that Alec Hardison crossed paths with other geeks [3]
Category: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005), Leverage
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Gen, POV Outsider, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-10
Updated: 2010-09-10
Packaged: 2017-10-11 15:36:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/113957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mermaid/pseuds/mermaid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mickey Smith claims that his girlfriend Rose left Earth with an alien in a blue box.  Alec Hardison is...skeptical.  And how the hell do you google a guy called "the Doctor", anyway?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Age(s) of the Geek, chapter 3 - Leverage / Doctor Who

**Author's Note:**

> This is the third in a series of interconnected _Leverage_ crossovers, all focusing on Alec Hardison and his encounters with fellow geeks from various TV shows. It can be read independently, but it'll make more sense if you read the previous chapters first.
> 
> For the purposes of this fic, please disregard the fact that Hardison is a canonical _Doctor Who_ fan! In my AU, Rose Tyler and Mickey Smith are real people from London.
> 
> Spoilers: for seasons 1 and 2 of the new _Doctor Who_, and season 7 of _Buffy_. Pre-canon for _Leverage_, so no spoilers.

  
  
**Alec Hardison and Mickey Smith, 2005 – 2007**   
  


Over the years, Alec had seen _all kinds_ of weird shit online. Some things made him scratch his head, while others made him yearn for brain bleach. It didn't help that he belonged to several message boards devoted to strange occurrences. Overactive imaginations, mental illness and heavy drug use might have accounted for many of the more extreme claims he came across.

But other phenomena were so widely reported that maybe there actually was something to them. Vampires and werewolves featured in folktales and urban legends all over the world, and Alec had learnt from his friend Willow that they were very real indeed.  


There was another phenomenon that kept popping up over and over: the Doctor. As a forum mod, Alec often deployed tactical snark when people asked stupid questions that were easily searchable. But he didn't blame the newbies who showed up enquiring about this mysterious figure they'd just seen / met / been rescued by. How the hell could you google a guy called "the Doctor", anyhow? Alec tried it himself, and got millions of hits.

The physical descriptions of the Doctor varied hugely. Sometimes he was tall, with wild brown curls and a ridiculously long scarf; sometimes he was an old man with white hair and a cane. His outfits ranged from a cool black leather jacket to an eye-wateringly multi-colored ensemble. Everyone agreed that he was a white dude with an English accent, but that was about it.

There was one other recurring detail: many of the witnesses mentioned seeing a big blue box, like an old-fashioned phone booth, which often appeared (or disappeared) when the Doctor was around. Combining "the Doctor" and "blue box" as search terms narrowed down the results, but there was still a lot of garbage to sift through.

Apart from the usual malware pages, which put up nonsense strings of words to lure naïve googlers, some unexpected sites showed up. For instance, it turned out that some moms wrote detailed blog posts about their kids' medical appointments...right down to the fact that _the doctor_ kept lollipops for child patients in a _blue box_ on his desk. Sigh.

Anyway, it was all a bit too clichéd for Alec to take it seriously. A guy changing his appearance? A phone booth, always conveniently nearby? Performing extraordinary feats and saving lives, without any weapons and without sticking around to claim a reward? Yeah, that sounded familiar. Alec might have been a massive comics fan, but he didn't actually believe that Superman was real.

***

So when he first came across Mickey Smith on one of his message boards, in mid-2005, Alec was ready to roll his eyes and scroll down to the next post. He was working long hours at his boring new programming job, and his online time was a lot more precious now than when he'd been at college.

But a couple of things made Alec stop and take notice. Mickey went further than most of the other Doctor-ites, stating that the white British guy was an alien and the blue box was both a spaceship and a time machine. Strangely, though, he didn't come across as some wild-eyed tinhat wearer; instead, he told his story plainly and clearly. Mickey also seemed to know his way around a computer (including how to use spell-check and the shift key), which often improved Alec's opinion of a person.

Most intriguingly, Mickey claimed that his girlfriend Rose had voluntarily gone off-planet with the Doctor. It was like Trillian leaving with Zaphod in _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_, Alec thought. Nobody had yet claimed that the Doctor had a non-standard number of heads, but it was probably just a matter of time...

The police naturally suspected Mickey of killing Rose, and had already interviewed him three times since her disappearance. So he had a vested interest in working out what the Doctor's deal was, and fast.

Mickey said that after he and Rose first met the Doctor, they'd found a website about him run by a fellow Londoner. Unfortunately that guy, Clive, had died soon afterwards in a bizarre shopping mall accident. Mickey had taken over his [website](http://www.whoisdoctorwho.co.uk/index1.shtml), updating it as he gathered more information. He'd joined all the paranormal forums he could find, telling his story and appealing for help.

Over the next few months, Mickey put together a sizeable dossier on the Doctor. He tracked down some of the other folks that had reported meeting the guy, and recorded their stories. He also created a map of possible sightings of the blue box.

***

Mickey's tireless efforts made Alec curious, and he did some digging. He found that Rose Tyler had indeed vanished without trace, and that the police suspected Mickey but had no evidence. Alec also discovered that something very weird had been happening in London around the time she disappeared. Apparently it involved plastic objects coming to life, which made Clive's mannequin-induced death a little less inexplicable. Naturally the authorities had tried to dismiss the whole thing as a mass hallucination, but Alec managed to locate some security camera footage that clearly showed store dummies chasing and killing people.

Since Mickey's story checked out (at least to some extent), Alec decided to email him and offer to help. He showed Mickey how to move from simple googling to trawling the deep Web for information, and also taught him the basics of hacking. Alec thought of this as paying it forward, as Willow had originally set him on his own path towards hacker supremacy.

Together, Alec and Mickey accessed the networks of various governments around the world. They found nothing at the Pentagon, but struck _gold_ at the British Ministry of Defence. After breaking through multiple layers of security, Alec uncovered a whole file on the Doctor. There were old handwritten documents that had been scanned in, plus a database of more recent intel.

The recorded sightings of the Doctor went back a couple of centuries, at least, and there were some great stories. In 1863, a fierce argument between an elderly man in a purple velvet jacket and a green monster with tentacles was witnessed by a wounded Confederate soldier. The creature stomped out of the makeshift hospital; the old guy sat down at the bewildered patient's bedside and introduced himself as the Doctor. The two men talked for a while, before the Doctor walked into a big blue box which then vanished. The soldier told his nurse, who dutifully recorded the details, but naturally nobody believed him. Somehow, though, this Civil War medical file ended up in the British military archives.

Then there was the bizarre 1968 encounter in India between the Beatles, a middle-aged blond man in a cricketer's uniform, and a group of fish-headed creatures wearing water-filled glass helmets and carrying musical instruments. The band's incoherent account of the epic cross-species jam session that followed was explained away by their heavy drug use at the time. But clearly the UK authorities took it seriously enough to add to the Doctor's file.

Alec could see a few plausible explanations for these disparate sightings. Maybe the Doctor was a character played by a series of guys, who'd each inherited the title and the blue box from his predecessor (like in _The Princess Bride_). It could be a massive mindfuck, a practical joke played out over several generations, or a really weird psychology experiment.

Mickey's story about an alien with a time machine might explain the Doctor popping in and out of history, but didn't explain how he had so many faces. A shapeshifter, maybe? Alec wasn't prepared to rule it out. After all, he lived in a world where a petite blonde teenager was chosen by The Powers That Be to kill vampires, and where a gateway to Hell had swallowed an entire town...

***

The mystery solved itself, just a month later. The Doctor came back to London a year after he'd left, landing his big blue box in the middle of a housing project. Rose Tyler was with him, in perfect health and completely unaware of the pain she'd caused by disappearing. Mickey emailed Alec with the good news, saying he was greatly relieved to see Rose but still mad at her for all she'd put him through.

Alec's excitement at the Doctor's reappearance was rather overshadowed by what happened next: an alien ship crash-landed in London! He had to divide his time between watching CNN and modding his overheated forums. The tinhats were gleefully saying "I told you so" while the cultists were predicting the end of the world. Meanwhile, a flamewar broke out over whether "alien" or "extraterrestrial" was the more appropriate term.

Mickey got caught up in subsequent events, and didn't have time to email Alec until later. But it turned out that Alec's mentoring of him had kinda sorta helped to _save the world_. Evil aliens had taken over the British government, planning to start World War III, blow up the planet and sell the radioactive chunks to other aliens. Under incredible pressure, Mickey had managed to hack a submarine's controls and launch a missile at 10 Downing Street to kill them. The Doctor and Rose had also been inside the building, but thankfully they had survived.

When it was all over, the Doctor invited Mickey to travel the universe with him and Rose. But Mickey said no, and had to watch his girlfriend vanish into thin air again. Alec didn't really blame him for turning down the chance. He himself had enjoyed being Willow's friend and sometime technical assistant from a safe distance (about 2,000 miles), while she and her friends learnt the plural of "apocalypse" the hard way.

Alec knew all the ways you could kill a vampire, and had even devised a way to destroy every undead bloodsucker in sight, yet he'd never actually seen one. He always carried at least one wooden stake, just in case, but he didn't know whether he'd be able to _use_ it if he came face-to-fang with a vampire.

So if the Doctor showed up in his ship and asked Alec to come along, he wasn't entirely sure that he'd take up the offer. The idea of space tourism was insanely attractive in theory, but in reality it seemed highly dangerous – and unpredictable. Rose had meant to come back in 12 hours, but the time machine malfunctioned and brought her back after 12 months.

Alec did want to get a look inside that blue box, though, not least so he could understand the _science_ of it. Mickey had been on board the ship, which was apparently called the TARDIS, and reported that it was much bigger on the inside. That solved one problem: Alec had been wondering how an oversized wooden phone booth could be big enough to house three people, let alone strong enough to travel through time and space. But it raised a whole other set of questions...

***

Mickey's burning desire to investigate the Doctor understandably diminished after Rose left him again. Now that he was no longer a suspected killer, he could get on with his life. He stopped updating his website, but left it up in case other people encountered the Doctor and came online looking for answers. Alec helped out by manipulating the google results, ensuring that anyone searching for "the Doctor" or "blue box" got Mickey's site as the first hit.

The Doctor had asked Mickey to spread a virus that would wipe out all mention of him on the Internet. Maybe Mickey no longer hated the guy for ruining his life, but he wasn't sure he wanted to make the Doctor's life that much simpler. So he emailed Alec for advice, asking him to look at it.

Alec was stunned; it was the first time in years that he'd come across something so far beyond his own abilities. The virus actually could do what the Doctor described, which Alec would have said was _impossible_. Part of him wanted to set it free, just to watch what happened. But Alec was all about information being free, especially online. It was how he justified torrenting TV shows, true, but it was still a deeply-held philosophical belief. So he supported Mickey's eventual decision not to release the virus.

The Doctor and Rose came back to England a couple of times over the following months. At Christmas, during another alien invasion, Mickey found out how the Doctor came to have so many different faces: when he was about to die, he "regenerated". He kept his memories and abilities, but had new personality quirks and a new body.

Apparently this upgraded version of the Doctor was more handsome and a lot more charming than the last one, which didn't make Mickey feel any better about his girlfriend living with the guy. Alec, reading Mickey's email about being beamed aboard the aliens' ship, could be a little more objective about the whole thing. The Doctor's ability to renew his body, and delay his death, just blew Alec's mind.

***

A few months later, in one of his regular emails to Alec, Mickey mentioned some weird stuff happening at a London school. He was planning to contact the Doctor and Rose, and suggest that they come investigate it.

After that, though, Mickey disappeared. His workmates reported him missing, and the police checked out his flat: it looked like he'd just gone out for the day, with dishes piled in the sink and dirty washing in the hamper. He stopped answering Alec's emails, his bank balance wasn't touched, and months passed without any sign of him. When Alec hacked into the British police database, he was unsurprised to see that the cops had no leads at all.

"Vanished off the face of the Earth" was usually a figure of speech, but in Mickey's case it seemed literally true. Alec was pretty sure that he'd changed his mind, and gone off in the TARDIS. He missed Mickey, who'd become a good friend despite the fact that they'd never met offline, but wished him the best of luck.

Alec rarely chose to spend much time outside of big cities; he _hated_ small towns and rural areas. Internet access was often pathetic, decent pizza was hard to get, and some hicks weren't too pleased to see a black man in their midst.

One of the few upsides of being out in the sticks, though, was a great view of the stars. When Alec got stranded between two major metropolitan areas on a clear night, he'd go outside and gaze up at the night sky. Somewhere out there was a blue box containing a 900-year-old alien, a blonde named Rose, and Mickey. He hoped they were having the time of their lives.


End file.
